Danlambao: We will not be silenced

On September 12, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan
Dung issued an administrative order--number 7169--accusing us, Danlambao,
of "publishing information that is false, fabricated, and untruthful to slander
the leadership of the nation, to agitate the people against the Party and the
State, to cause doubts and create bad publicity reducing the people's trust in
the state leadership." The order directed the Ministry of Public Security and
the Ministry of Information Communication and Media to investigate and
discipline any groups or individuals who affiliate with Danlambao.

This is not unexpected. We wait to see how the ministries will
utilize their staffs and the state's powerful machinery--funded by our people's
tax money--to lawfully, transparently, and publically prove the accusations
against us.

The prime minister also directed all
ministries, state agencies, local officials, and public servants "not to read,
to use, to spread, nor to disseminate any information from Danlambao." This order is a direct violation of the freedom of
expression enshrined in our constitution and of the international convention on
human rights to which Vietnam is a signatory. All public servants and officials
first of all are citizens of Vietnam, and secondly are the people's
representatives. In order to fulfill their duties, they must have the right to
access and assess freely information about the state and its system; such
rights enable them to recognize criticisms and proposals to correct and improve
in the public interest.

Danlambao will not succumb to any state order aimed at silencing us. No
government or political party has the right to choose for the people what
information they can read, hear, or exchange. Political, economic, and social
policies; conditions for freedom of speech and human rights; and territorial
disputes with China are all vital topics for Vietnamese citizens. Additionally,
our readership hungers for information about Communist Party leaders--their
personal wealth or their abuse of power and corruption, or the infighting that
occurs between party factions. Danlambao
will continue to provide information and multidimensional views on these and
other topics, and to create a forum where our readers report news and represent
their own perspectives on matters which affect their daily lives. Additionally,
Danlambao will not side with any
faction within the Party nor allow ourselves to be influenced by any "foreign"
or "hostile" force--as the prime minister accuses us of doing. We reject the
influence of any political power or elite. It is the nation that we serve.

Of course, we must balance this commitment
with our responsibility to protect our contributors, our news gatherers, and
our community of bloggers from the authorities' harassment and threats. This demands
careful work and planning. In order to cover an important event--a land dispute
or an anti-China protest, a court trial, a labor strike-- our contributors
sometimes must quietly leave their homes days in advance and stay in hiding. Once
they are ready to send their news to our editorial team, they must have plans
and methods to do so immediately and anonymously, without leaving saved
documents on their computers or any other trail. Our contributors include not
only independent newsgatherers and freelancers, but also reporters from
mainstream media and informants from within the government.

And the battle is not finished once the
news has been gathered. The authorities' cyber army takes aim at Danlambao with nonstop distributed
denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, malware, and firewalls. Last year, DDoS
attacks ahead of the Party's five-yearly
congress and the trial of legal scholar and human rights campaigner Cu Huy Ha Vu
were so severe that we were forced to switch blog platforms.

The day after order 7169 was broadcast on
state media in Vietnam, the number of page views on our site soared to
500,000. In response to this failure to
threaten people to stop reading Danlambao,
authorities apparently shored up firewalls; this succeeded in bringing the
number of page views back down to 280,000 on average per day.

In the long term, we believe that the
Vietnamese media will change--has already changed to a certain degree--and we
take pride in our role influencing that evolution. We expect more journalists
who work for state-owned media to join the free and independent bloggers'
community. We expect independent media to become a viable alternative to
state-owned media; already Party leaders are using our site to criticize one
another, especially during elections or other politically sensitive times. Some
of our friends and colleagues who work for state-owned media tell us that they
must change simply to compete, if not for other, morally-driven reasons. We
welcome such competition.

In the meantime, Danlambao calls upon all our contributors, readers, and supporters
to continue sending a clear message to Prime Minister Dung that we are
committed to freedom of expression by each of us:

introducing a new friend to Danlambao.

helping someone who does not yet know how
to circumvent a firewall.

posting a positive and constructive comment
to encourage others to hope for the best for our nation.

scribbling the address of our site, danlambaovn.blogspot.com,
on dong bank notes, so that it reaches potential readers across our country